Some disjointed thoughts and questions about surrogacy and feminism

I think it's slavery. A woman is enslaved to give the baby she gestated for nine months and then delivered, away. And it's not just gay men who enslave women in this way. It's invasive and intrusive. That woman will never forget what she did.

Paid surrogacy is prostitution on steroids. Paying a poor woman from the third world to get pregnant, carry your child for 8 months and then give you the baby at the end of it is appalling.

Generally, if something is banned in the UK there is a good reason for it. Using one's wealth to go overseas and circumvent the law is possible, but one would hope that they would at least have stopped and thought about why it was not possible to access commercial surrogacy at home

I agree, and clusterfucks like this can happen:

www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australasia/hope-for-gammy-fund-set-up-after-australian-couple-refuse-to-take-downs-syndrome-baby-from-thai-9642364.html

Again no problem if anyone who has a spectacularly close friend or relative will do this for them, so I am not against it in principle.

However exploiting women from developing economies is clearly wrong.

I think if it's for a sister or best friend, I can see its a lovely thing for both parties. Although not without potentially massive problems.

I can't see how any other scenario can be positive for all concerned. Its nearly always going to be the richer paying poorer women to use their body. It isn't a choice wealthy women make, no matter how much she enjoys being pregnant.

D'oh Diane Abbot moment there - in excess of 1 in 500! (One day I will learn to divide, but today is not that day...)

Pre-babies, I couldn't see the problem with surrogacy. Now the concept revolts me.

It's 24/7 physical work which is nearly always hugely undervalued. They are planning to pay someone to risk their life and future health for them.

Do they understand they are thinking about paying someone to risk death? Incontinence? Prolapse? How can they get past that?

I can maybe just about understand it if a couple knows someone who loved being pregnant and enjoyed birth, and wanted to do it again but didn't want another child. An altruistic arrangement entered into 100% freely I would consider a private thing that I don't have a right to comment on.

But paid surrogacy? It's like prostitution.

I think you're right to see commercial surrogacy and prostitution as cut from the same cloth. Both involve women's lack of economic agency and inequalities in job access and earning power to commodify women's bodies and coerce women into undertaking dangerous activities. In the case of prostitution risks include STIs, violence and even murder (someone on one of these boards recently posted a link to statistics suggesting that prostitutes were somewhere like 20 to 60 times more likely to be murdered than women in the general population).

Pregnancy and childbirth remain risky. Even in this country the risk of dying in childbirth is 8 per 100,000 live births. The global average (just googled UNICEF's figures) as of 2015 was 216 per 100,000 - so in excess of a 1 in 50 chance of dying in childbirth. Okay, commercial surrogates are likely to have access to the best maternal care their country can supply - but it's still a long way off being risk free. Then there's morbidity following childbirth - long-term issues like fistulas, prolapse, incontinence (urinary and fecal), etc.

There are also issues of social control and coercion, lack of privacy and removal of right to a family life. In order to ensure that the foetus really belongs to the donors rather than the birth family, I believe it's not uncommon for commercial surrogates to be expected to spend their pregnancy in hostels run by the surrogacy agency, not allowed to see their husbands or birth children.

Children and women in developing nations are certainly very vulnerable in this arrangement. It has a very consumerist feel about it too- I want a baby, I'll pay for one.

Julie Bindel aka the devil incarnate allegedly has written quite a lot about surrogacy.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/20/commercial-surrogacy-wombs-rent-same-sex-pregnancy

www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/apr/01/outsourcing-pregnancy-india-surrogacy-clinics-julie-bindel

Altruistic surrogacy is, I think, slightly different, but an enormous number of people opt for paid surrogacy services and these tend to be of the "renting brown women's wombs for money" type arrangements.